Information theory, in the context provided here, is a way of understanding information as something distinct from matter and energy, and of describing its flow, preservation, transmission, and transformation in quantitative terms. The passages place it within the mid-20th-century shift toward cybernetics and computer science, when a new model emerged in which mind could be treated as information processing. Norbert Wiener’s 1948 book Cybernetics is presented as a key source for this shift. Wiener argued that the processes of life and intelligence could be grasped as flows of information, and he emphasized the analogy between the brain and the computer. His famous claim that “information is information, not matter or energy” is used to support a revised worldview in which mental and biological phenomena are understood as information patterns rather than as purely material entities.
In this framing, information theory is not limited to communication engineering. It also functions as a philosophical and theoretical basis for cognitive science, computational models of mind, and the idea that human thought can be described as algorithmic information processing. The context further connects information-theoretic thinking to cellular automata and complexity theory, where the balance between information retention and information transmission is described as crucial at the “edge of chaos.” However, the provided passages do not offer a full technical definition of information theory in the Shannon sense, so only this broader historical and conceptual usage can be stated confidently.